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When students protesting "microaggressions" took over an administrative building at Occidental College in California, they issued 14 demands. The school agreed to all except the first, which required the firing of its president. Similar protests took place concurrently at other colleges nationwide.

I'm more than a little reluctant to write this column. Whatever I write will be interpreted through another lens: that of the abortion debate. One of the many bad consequences of a debate that has now lasted more than four decades is that we can't talk about anything without first trying to fit it within the abortion debate, which is not necessarily the only or best way to look at it.

Donald Trump is like a contagion who infects everyone around him. Once you've kissed, you can never wipe his saliva off your face. Consider the venerable (in its own view) NBC. This year, the network fired Trump, only to find it is Trump Lite.

DEAR DR. ROACH: With the flu season coming on, would you please discuss the difference between what people call the "stomach flu" and what the flu really is? I have two friends who last year said they weren't getting the flu shot anymore because despite having it, they got the flu. They each described several hours of throwing up, but feeling better the next day. I suggested that they probably had a gastrointestinal episode and not influenza, which is a respiratory disease. They insisted that they had the flu, and they'd always learned that the stomach flu is ...

In the wake of the horrors in Paris, it only made sense to change the focus of Saturday night's Democratic debate from economic issues to national security, as CBS News did. You might think the candidates would jump at the opportunity to have a large audience hear them address the frightening specter of ISIS.

President Barack Obama wants the United States to take in 10,000 Syrian refugees next year -- but in the wake of last week's Paris attacks and reports that one of the terrorists may have had a valid Syrian passport with a stamp from Greece, more than half the governors in this country, a mostly Republican group, are opposed. They fear that a jihadi will embed with fleeing refugees. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted, "Security comes first."

"Why can't we take out these bastards?" CNN's Jim Acosta bluntly asked President Obama at a Monday press conference at the Group of 20 summit in Turkey. "These bastards," of course, are the Islamic State - at least for Acosta. As Obama called Friday's attacks in Paris that left at least 129 dead a "sickening setback," he saw no need to reset his Syrian policy.

Former San Francisco 49ers star Kermit Alexander is death penalty opponents' worst nightmare. Foes of the death penalty argue that the criminal justice system is skewed against African-Americans and that prosecutors are less likely to seek the death penalty when victims are black. Alexander is an African-American who grew up in the projects of Los Angeles. So were the four members of his family slain in a 1984 contract killing gone wrong. He has watched the three black men convicted for the murders try to escape responsibility for their crimes. In prison, Darren Williams - the Rollin' 60s Neighborhood Crips gang ...

It took them way too long to do it, and it happened in no small measure because of the tireless work of Stuart Eizenstat, who has been at this for years. But France finally agreed to make reparations to American, Israeli and Canadian survivors (and the families of survivors) who were transported on state-owned trains to Nazi death camps.

Activists at the University of Missouri just won themselves a trophy Monday. After weeks of protests against the president of the University of Missouri System, Tim Wolfe - and, most importantly, after the Mizzou football team threatened to boycott games until Wolfe quit - the administrator caved. "It is my belief we stopped listening to each other. We have to respect each other enough to stop yelling at each other and start listening and quit intimidating each other," said the clearly intimidated Wolfe.